"Linux vendor Canonical said it has 'no interest' in Linux kernel development. Two weeks ago a Linux Foundation report showed that since version 2.6.32, Microsoft had committed more code to the Linux kernel than Canonical. Since then, Canonical has faced claims from rivals that it does not contribute to Linux as much as it should given its popularity. Recently Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth told The Inquirer that his company has no interest in contributing to the Linux kernel." Why is this such a bad thing? You can contribute more to open source than code alone. Like, I don't know, users?

a) They spun off Red Hat (the free, desktop version) to Fedora project. That is user-based testing platform, not for serious use. They don't do much customization there, just stabilize during the (short) support period and then release that later as commercial Red Hat Enterprise Linux product.

b) Everything they do, they do on the server side. Focus on server, on cloud - related tech. Nothing on desktop, nada.

They go where the money is, good for them. Good for us - we get stabilized software downstream, in ubuntu and such. But I wouldn't touch Fedora on a desktop with a ten yard pole - the first and only Linux distro that went kernel-panic on my hardware was Fedora release.

He is right in saying so, and it is the right way to do for a company that focuses on UI and user-friendly operating system development.

How can ANYONE mod this down? Is it the Red Hat comment? Granted that may be a little over the top, but the rest of this comment is spot damn on...Linux NEEDS companies like Canical, unfortunately there aren't really any others to speak of that have been nearly as successful.

Canical "gets" what they do. They are in the business of molding Linux into something usable by the consumers. I'm not saying they are completely successfully at it, but that is their MO. They don't need to muck about with the kernel to do this - what they need to do is listen to their users and package the product in a way that appeals to their sensibilities. The Red Hats and Debians of the world are absolutely horrible at this.

The world needs Red Hats and Debians too - don't get me wrong... But if you Canical gave up tomorrow desktop linux would lose at least half of its already small userbase.

Ask yourself what is more important to the success of Linux in the long run - widespread adoption by non-technical users or having it work and look the way you want it to? How does Canical using Linux (or open source in general) somehow take something away from you? You don't use Ubuntu - why do you even care?

I really don't get this selfish viewpoint some people in the OSS world have - why the f*ck do you want to license software so liberally but at the same time piss on how it is being used - just because it doesn't suit you? There is nothing in the GPL about having to be a prolific contributor.

I say that anyone using Linux for any reason short of violating the license is a good thing for Linux.

ps. I'm not directing my angst against the poster - my comments where motivated by the post being modded down...

Being easy to operate on the front end and highly configurable on the backend.
As much as I like creating software, spending X hours changing parameters on my system is not something I want to do. A Linux distribution is not 1 package with 1 config file, unfortunately.

That is their contribution - making a sane distribution and forcing others to do something similar.

The stats on kernel contribution are not produced by someone from Red Hat; they're produced by the Linux Foundation. The article under discussion in this thread is written by a journalist and quotes Mark Shuttleworth. It's worth pointing out that the journalist in question appears to be on a one-man mission to provoke discord between RH and Canonical by throwing incendiary quotes from people at RH and Canonical at each other, and those on both sides have now resolved to stop letting him do it.

As for Red Hat 'leaving the desktop for dead', that's highly inaccurate. As I pointed out in the comments on the original article, Red Hat pays at least seven GNOME developers (I think there's more but couldn't remember them all), three X.org developers, a LibreOffice developer, an ALSA developer, the NetworkManager developer, and the PulseAudio developer (Lennart). And those are just the examples that sprang to my mind. RH sponsors an awful lot of F/OSS desktop development.